Watershed Discipleship: Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice

By Denise M. Nadeau

This collection introduces and explores "watershed discipleship" as a critical, contextual, and constructive approach to ecological theology and practice, and features emerging voices from a generation that has grown up under the shadow of climate catastrophe. Watershed Discipleship is a "triple entendre" that recognizes we are in a watershed historical moment of crisis, focuses on our intrinsically bioregional locus as followers of Jesus, and urges us to become disciples of our watersheds. Bibliographic framing essays by Myers trace his journey into a bioregionalist Christian faith and practice and offer reflections on incarnational theology, hermeneutics, and ecclesiology. The essays feature more than a dozen activists, educators, and practitioners under the age of forty, whose work and witness attest to a growing movement of resistance and reimagination across North America. This anthology overviews the bioregional paradigm and its theological and political significance for local sustainability, restorative justice, and spiritual renewal. Contributors reread both biblical texts and churchly practices (such as mission, baptism, and liturgy) through the lens of "re-place-ment." Herein is a comprehensive and engaged call for a "Transition church" that can help turn our history around toward environmental resiliency and social justice, by passionate advocates on the front lines of watershed discipleship.

CONTRIBUTORS: Sasha Adkins, Jay Beck, Tevyn East, Erinn Fahey, Katarina Friesen, Matt Humphrey, Vickie Machado, Jonathan McRay, Sarah Nolan, Reyna Ortega, Dave Pritchett, Erynn Smith, Sarah Thompson, Lydia Wylie-Kellermann

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Oct 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781498280778

Book preview

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Watershed Discipleship

Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice

Edited by Ched Myers

Foreword by 
Denise M. Nadeau

10475.png

Watershed Discipleship

Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice

Copyright ©

2016

Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

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www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-8076-1

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-8078-5

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-8077-8

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Myers, Ched, ed.

Watershed discipleship : reinhabiting bioregional faith and practice. / Ched Myers, ed.

Eugene, OR: Cascade Publications,

2016

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers:

isbn 978-1-4982-8076-1 (

paperback

) | isbn 978-1-4982-8078-5 (

hardcover

) | isbn 978-1-4982-8077-8 (

ebook

)

Subjects: LCSH:

1

. Watershed management. |

2

. Ecology Religious aspects Christianity. |

3

. Political theology. |

4

. Title.

Classification:

BT 695.5 .W37 2016 | call number (

ebook

)

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

07/27/16

Rita Wong poem, Foreword: permission granted by email

New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright

1989

, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Introduction: A Critical, Contextual, and Constructive Approach to Ecological Theology and Practice

Chapter 1: The Great Commission

Chapter 2: Watershed Discipleship in Babylon

Chapter 3: The Transfigured Earth

Chapter 4: God’s Gonna Trouble the Water

Chapter 5: Caring for Our Waters

Chapter 6: An Ecological Beloved Community

Chapter 7: A Pipeline Runs through Naboth’s Vineyard

Chapter 8: Growing from the Edges

Chapter 9: Plastics as a Spiritual Crisis

Chapter 10: Bioregionalism and the Catholic Worker Movement

Chapter 11: The Carnival de Resistance

Afterword: Toward Watershed Ecclesiology

"What is the shape of Christian discipleship fitted to the watershed moment Earth now faces? It’s radical, creative, and practical. But let diverse young peace and justice activists and visionaries instruct you. Their fresh biblical exegesis, interlaced with the experience of coming home to their bioregions and its waters of life, will inspire you from front to back in this remarkable volume. I wholly commend Watershed Discipleship."

—Larry Rasmussen

Reinhold Niebuhr Professor Emeritus of Social Ethics, Union Theological Seminary; 
Author, Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key

Myers brings a much-needed prophetic voice to the church with his call to watershed discipleship. The way he frames the issues—along with hopeful actions—and then engages an array of younger voices makes this anthology poignant. The book helps the church rediscover that the bioregional lens is critical to practicing the good news of the gospel. This material will be required reading in the collegiate courses I teach and with congregations seeking a new paradigm for living out their faith.

—Luke Gascho

Executive Director, Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center, Goshen College; 
Leader, Mennonite Creation Care Network

Read and emulate these fierce young farmers, organizers, artists, and engineers. They are challenging racist systems of colonial ecocide with empowered and humble relationships to land, water, creature, and neighbor. This book is important not because it offers some shred of hope for the future of the church but because it shows Christians who are relevant allies in the struggle for the planet.

—Laurel Dykstra

Salal + Cedar Watershed Discipleship Community, Coast Salish Territory

Ched Myers and the team of young authors he has assembled offer in this volume a Spirit-inspired, theologically grounded call to action that is filled with passionate hope. They summon readers into a spiritual and deeply reverent relationship with water and with other people through engagement with water. And they bid us draw upon the Spirit to transform seemingly intractable situations in which watersheds are abused and people are exploited in the process. These authors teach watershed discipleship as a path of resistance to ways of living that breed social and ecological disaster and illuminate a path toward transformation and renewal. They wed prescient critique with faith-rooted hope and practical, constructive proposals for change. The result is a remarkable paradigm for doing theology and theological ethics, a practical vision for bioregionally reoriented societies, and a prophetic witness to God’s life-giving love for this splendid creation. People in the church, academy, and activist communities will be wise to drink from the wellspring of this extraordinary proposal for what it means to be people of faith in the early twenty-first century.

—Cynthia Moe-Lobeda

Professor of Theological Ethics, 
Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union

To those gone before, in gratitude: Jim Corbett and Charity Hicks;

To those battling still, with respect: Fred Vigil and Julie Tumamait;

To those coming up, in hope: Willem, Isaac, Gabe, and their generation.

Prophecies from the Watershed Confederacy

Rose Marie Berger

In those days, when the crown

o’er the earth melted and humans

were thick upon the land

a sigh rose up and weeping

from rocks, rivers, hills and streams:

abandon your house,

abandon what you possess,

build a boat instead.

Bless your curach with pine boughs

and singing. Kiss the runnels and rills,

estuaries and arroyos who bear you up.

Be born again

into water and living spirit.

*

Then from the heavens

sky-brothers fought;

the stars in their orbits did battle.

Moon and water rose as one,

rode roughshod over culvert,

subaltern sewer, corrugated pipe.

The pretty petals of the rich fell

slick, opaque against the muddy bank.

The stream Kishon swept

those lordly enemies away;

that ancient river, Kishon.

And Ha-Shem kept his word to the fish.

To sleek, trinitarian salmon

who out-braved the Lords of profit,

Ha-Shem said, ‘Swim swiftly now.

Come hide in my headwaters

where the brothers will give you

strength, where against your enemies

the mothers will make ceremony,

even if they die, as the Maidu

warrior-women died defending

the River of Sorrows.’

And so they ran up ladders, ledges,

fords, dams. From pool to resting pool,

flashing, slashing tails, lithe and pinked

with power, a fish-rush headlong

up the ancient river, cold as

silver, flecked and cut with broken

stars. Empty-stomached Chum, Chinook,

Coho, blessed with hunger for Ha-Shem

and the Maidu-mother songs.

*

To the human remnant Ha-Shem said:

‘If you cannot see the water,

you will not see the Water Walker.

If you misconceive bread,

you will not conceive water.

Seek life instead of riches.’

Notes

the crown / o’er the earth melted: Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra.

The stream Kishon . . .that ancient river, Kishon: Judges

5

:

21

.

And Ha-Shem kept his word / to the fish: From Rashi’s commentary on Judges

5

.

abandon your house, abandon what you possess, build a boat instead: David Ferry.

1993

. "from Gilgamesh: Tablet

11

." In Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Maidu warrior-women / died defending the River of Sorrows’: See Peter J. Hayes.

2005

. The Lower American River: Prehistory to Parkway. Carmichael, CA: The American River Natural History Association.

Water Walker: See Mark

6

:

30–52

and Denise Nadeau’s Foreword.

Seek life instead of riches: David Ferry, "from Gilgamesh: Tablet

11

."

Foreword

Listening to Water Walkers

Denise M. Nadeau

Water is spirit and a relative. This is a teaching I have learned from many Indigenous women over the years. There are several dimensions to it: water is alive; it is sacred; it is part of a holistic system, a greater interconnected whole; and we have obligations to water as a relative with whom we are in relationship. How can these teachings inform how we engage with Watershed Discipleship?

The difficulty for me has been to internalize what these teachings mean in order to change my practice. I am constantly struggling to free myself from Euro-Western objectifications of water. Water as a commodity, as a human right, as a resource—these conceptions all conjure up the notion of water’s utility for humans. Underlying them is a deep disconnection from water. The crisis of water depletion, destruction, and pollution, as well as lack of access to clean and affordable water in much of the world, is a spiritual crisis as much as a political, social, and economic one. However, much of our organizing around water justice on Vancouver Island has centered humans in the struggle, rather than seeing the deep interconnections that define an embodied relationship with water. I have often found myself drained by and even resentful of activism for watershed protection that does not emanate from spiritual principles.

My journey to unlearn this objectification of water, and to experience water as a living relative, continues to be a long one. My colleague Alannah Young Leon first taught me that in her Anishinabe tradition women carry the responsibility to uphold the sanctity of water, to honor and protect it. I began to understand the scope of these responsibilities when I attended, with Alannah, the Three Fires Midewiwin initiation ceremonies in Bad River, Wisconsin in 2004. There I first observed a women’s ceremony of honoring water which involved songs, stories, and sharing of water. And there I was introduced to the work of the Mother Earth Water Walkers.

In 2003, Josephine Mandamin and other Anishinabe women associated with the Three Fires Lodge began what was to become the annual Mother Earth Water Walk. The Anishinabe live around the Great Lakes, and the first ceremonial walk circled Lake Superior. Each subsequent year, Water Walkers have walked around the other Great Lakes, then some of their tributary rivers, and beyond. Drawing on Anishinabe teachings, the goal of the Walkers has been to change the popular perception of water from that of a resource to that of a sacred being that must be treated as such, and to strengthen actions to protect water for future generations. The Walkers begin and end each day with a water ceremony; the walk is then led by a woman carrying a copper vessel of water, usually accompanied by a man carrying an eagle staff. Water Walkers routinely cover distances from five hundred to more than one thousand kilometers.

In the past decade, the influence of Water Walkers has spread, informing many similar projects. Indigenous women all over Turtle Island have been drawing on their respective water teachings to inspire and inform diverse actions to protect water and watersheds:

• The Tar Sands Healing Walk in Northern Alberta, where oil extraction is polluting the Athabasca and Mackenzie River watersheds, has embodied a ceremonial call for what Asian Canadian Rita Wong calls ethical water (2013).

• Idle No More, a women-initiated Indigenous movement, arose out of the need to stop a Canadian federal omnibus bill that has removed environmental protections of most of our rivers and waterways.

• The anti-fracking Mi’kmaq women warriors of Elsipogtog credit Water Walkers for informing their activism.

These are just a few examples of how women are taking the lead in spiritually-grounded water activism. Across Turtle Island, women are using educational workshops, ceremonial actions, and social media to promote Indigenous water teachings. All nations and nationalities are welcome to participate or support these walks. Mother Earth Water Walk (http://www.motherearthwaterwalk.com) and Water Walkers United (http://www.waterwalkersunited.com) are two expressions of this Indigenous grassroots activism.

A few years ago I invited the late Violet Caibaiosai, a Mother Earth Water Walker, to speak at an interfaith panel of women addressing the sacredness of water. Soon after she arrived in Vancouver, Violet and I went down to the ocean so she could acknowledge and honor the water in this traditional territory of the Tsleil-Waututh (Burrard), XwMuthkwium (Musqueam), and Skwxuwu-7mesh (Squamish) Nations. I learned from her how to offer tobacco to the water, and have maintained this practice since. I have learned that in order to bring the spiritual dimension into our relationship with water, one must practice that relationship by embodying reverence and reciprocity, the primary principles inherent in ceremony.

The Anishinabe way of life is centered on relationships, each of which carry responsibilities. The function of ceremony is to remind us about and to restore those relationships. This is why ceremony is critical to the work of protecting water and watersheds. If people feel a relational connection to the watershed in which they live, it is easier for them to act in an embodied way upon their responsibilities. Moreover, there is power in ritual and ceremony to effect change; one can draw on the energy of Spirit/spirits to transform seemingly intractable situations in which water and watersheds are being abused.

Another way I have learned to shift my relationship with water has been by articulating my relationship to specific watersheds. My French ancestors came to what is now called Quebec twelve generations ago, intermarrying with the Mi’gmaq on the Gespeg (Gaspé) peninsula but also colonizing their land. They drew maps that ignored watershed boundaries that had long been observed by people deeply connected to the life of the rivers and ocean. Cognizant of this history, I have worked to develop commitments to the Gesgapegiag (Cascapedia) River and Port Daniel River watersheds in Gespe’gawa’gi, the traditional territory of the seventh district of the Mi’qmaq Nation.

Besides these ancestral responsibilities I am slowly learning how to be a relative and visitor in the lands and waterways of the territory of the K’omoks Nation on Vancouver Island, where I live between the Trent and Puntledge River watersheds. By identifying myself in terms of the traditional territory and watersheds in which I reside, I encourage people to cultivate a watershed mind, as Peter Marshall puts it. It requires a cultural shift to acknowledge how intimately we are connected to water, both in our bodies (which are 75 percent water) and as bodies in place. Like our ancestors, we live in relationship to specific bodies of water for sustenance. My colleagues Dorothy Christian, from the Secwepemc (Splat’sin)/Syilx Nations, and Rita Wong challenge us to reimagine ourselves past our skin as a living part of a watershed, with which we are both interdependent and dependent (2013: 245).

Water, of which there is only a finite amount in the world, is the ultimate connector. It joins us to our ancestors and to the generations ahead, as Mi’kmaq anti-fracking activist Suzanne Patles has asserted (2014). It connects us to specific places, people and creatures we have not seen, life that is far away from us and life that came long before us. The work of protecting watersheds is thus not just for human beings; it is for all Creation, and for the past and the future.

I have learned from Alannah Young Leon that it is important to use song in honoring water. While many Indigenous nations have songs to honor water bodies with which they have a relationship, these are often private. Anishinabe activist Doreen Day has created a Nibi (water) song that is available on line, and she encourages all to sing it (song and story at http://www.motherearthwaterwalk.com/?attachment_id=2244). In workshops on water that Alannah and I facilitate we teach this song to model addressing water as spirit and relative. We invite all to say the words, We thank you, we love you and we respect you whenever they engage with the waterway nearest to them.

Nuu-chah-nulth activist Chaw-win-nis, at a recent workshop for Indigenous youth, reminded us that listening involves more than having an open mind and an open heart. In listening we take on the responsibility of being a witness and, in Coastal traditions, the call to act in response to what we have heard. I asked Musqueam elder Larry Grant to explain the meaning of listening in his Coast Salish language. He told me that the word xʷəy̓əne:mət ɬeʔ (in halq’eméylem) is Listen! I looked up the word in my Mi’gmaq dictionary and found that eulistuatl means listen to someone carefully.

What does it mean for Christians to listen to Indigenous women who are walking this walk? We are being invited to integrate respectfully Indigenous ways of knowing into our lives, and to how we relate to water and watersheds. Drawing from our Christian tradition, we can think in terms of the language of consecration, and draw from the deep wells of the Spirit within to guide and nourish us on this journey. The concept of watershed discipleship overcomes the artificial separation of humans from the natural world, grounding the work in deep commitment to all of creation. In listening to the voices of Indigenous women we engage in an interfaith relationship where we share a common conviction concerning the unity of creation. We are as well acknowledging the fact we are visitors, settlers on occupied but unceded territories, invited to follow the protocols of the nations in whose territories we live and work.

I am honored to contribute to this collection on watershed discipleship, a call to action by young writers who approach watershed reinhabitation from the dimension of the sacred. Ched Myers and I first met in Hawai’i twenty-five years ago at a conference of faith-rooted activists joining to support Indigenous self-determination movements throughout Oceania. Our respective journeys have had many parallels since, resonating again strongly in this project. I invite us all, as we walk our walk, to listen to the Indigenous voices in the communities in which we are doing our work. We can learn the original names of the waters in our regions, raise awareness about water walks in our areas, or even become a Water Walker, and educate about the sacredness of water. Let us involve youth in all our efforts, and practice both physical and spiritual engagement with water, approaching the water bodies in our bioregions with humility, reverence and respect.

Whenever we observe ceremony with water—from thanking the first drink of water we take in the day to acknowledging it in whatever ritual way is appropriate for our community—we affirm our interconnection, our oneness, with water and the watersheds of which we are part. We are also thereby joining as allies to support what Cherokee scholar Jeff Corntassel calls everyday acts of Indigenous resurgence, living out our relational, place-based responsibilities to land and waterways (2012).

I close with excerpts from Rita Wong’s poem Declaration of Intent, which I offer as a prayerful invocation to this anthology:

Let the colonial borders be seen for the pretensions they are

i hereby honour what the flow of water teaches us

the beauty of enough, the path of peace to be savoured

before the extremes of drought and flood overwhelm the careless

. . .

I hereby invoke fluid wisdom to guide us through the muck

I will apprentice myself to creeks and tributaries, groundwater and glaciers

Listen for the salty pulse within, the blood that recognizes marine ancestry

In its chemical composition and intuitive pull

I will learn through immersion, flotation and transformation

As water expands and contracts, I will fit myself into its ever changing dimensions

Molecular and spectacular water will return what we give it, be that

Arrogance and poison, reverence and light, ambivalence and respect

Let our societies be revived as watersheds (

2015

:

14

).

References

Christian, Dorothy and Rita Wong.

2013

. Untapping Watershed Mind. Pp.

232

–

253 in Thinking with Water, edited Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Corntassel, Jeff.

2012

. Re-envisioning Resurgence: Indigenous Pathways to Decolonization and Sustainable Self-Determination. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society

1

(

1

):

86

–

101

.

Patles, Suzanne.

2014

. Talk given at a strategy session co-sponsored by First Nations Studies and the English Department at Simon Fraser University (downtown Harbour Centre campus), January

24

th,

2014

; available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkN

1

Yz

88

VDU.

Wong, Rita.

2015

. undercurrent. Gibsons, B.C.: Nightwood Editions.

———.

2013

. Ethical Waters: Reflections on the Healing Walk in the Tar Sands. Feminist Review (

103

):

133

–

139

.

Acknowledgments

This anthology is the culmination to date of my long journey into a bioregionalist Christian faith and practice (see my Introduction for some of the autobiographical back story). It is, more specifically, the fruit of the last five years of reflection, organizing, and education around the theme of Watershed Discipleship. I introduced this phrase (inspired by the work of Gary Snyder and Brock Dolman) in 2010 at one of our Bartimaeus Institutes (http://www.bcm-net.org/BI) as part of my ongoing search for how to promote bioregionalism in North American churches. Since then we have been intensively workshopping and developing this theme in colloquia, lectures, trainings, networking, and conversation around North America.

This book is the product of a Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries (BCM) mentoring project during 2014–15, in which I worked with the contributors on theological reflection and writing. Most of the chapters in this collection were presented by their authors in draft form at the BCM Festival of Radical Discipleship in Oak View in February 2014, after which they underwent intensive review. While the editing process with these young, mostly unpublished writers has often been challenging, their ideas and perspectives speak strongly for themselves. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with these colleagues in the work of building capacity for the Watershed Discipleship movement in the coming years.

This project was made possible with support from a Research Grant from the Louisville Institute (http://www.louisville-institute.org/) and a Mentoring for Young Adults Grant from the Forum for Theological Exploration (http://fteleaders.org/); we thank both organizations. Parts of this collection are being translated into Spanish, and will be published and distributed among Spanish speaking communities engaging in this conversation. This aspect of the project is made possible by a grant from the Bob H. Johnson Family Foundation of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and we thank Steven Johnson for his facilitation of this support.

I am grateful to longtime friends and collaborators Denise Nadeau and Rose Marie Berger for their respective original contributions that open this volume, lending it the spiritual covering of seasoned elders. For more than a month, my partner in life and work Elaine Enns lent her considerable copyediting skills and attention to detail to help prepare the final manuscript for publication; without her help I would have been shipwrecked. BCM office manager Chris Wight also gave timely and cheerful technical support. Thanks to Rodney Clapp and Ian Creeger for shepherding this manuscript through the Wipf & Stock system, and to Adella Barret for doing most of the indexing. Above all, I am grateful to my younger colleagues for their contributions to this volume, valuable ideas which broaden and deepen our understanding of Watershed Discipleship, and most importantly, which they each strive to incarnate in the varying contexts of their respective work.

A word about those to whom this collection is dedicated. Jim Corbett is truly the spiritual grandfather of this project; Quaker rancher, borderlands human rights pioneer, and goatwalker, he demonstrated how Settlers might caretake and re-covenant with beloved land, and I am honored to have known him. Water warrior Charity Hicks died too soon, but is still the spiritual grandmother of the Detroit water struggle, which you will read about in Chapters Four and Five. ¡Presente! Fred Vigil is a veteran water rights activist in northern New Mexico who first taught me the political, social and spiritual meaning of watersheds; I have deep respect for him as a keeper of intergenerational wisdom. So too Julie Tumamait, a local Chumash elder who consistently extends hospitality and instruction to those of us who live in the traditional territory of her people here in the Ventura River Watershed. And Willem, Isaac, and Gabriel are the firstborn of three different young families (including two contributors) to whom we are close; they were each birthed during the season in which this book was being curated. We name them on behalf of their generation, which will carry on this movement—if we carry out our responsibilities as Watershed Disciples faithfully enough to secure their future.

Contributors

(in order of their appearance in this volume)

Rose Marie Berger, a Catholic poet and peace activist, is a senior associate editor, columnist, and poetry editor for Sojourners magazine. Author of Who Killed Donte Manning?: The Story of an American Neighborhood, she frequently speaks, leads retreats, and preaches in churches, seminaries, and on college campuses. Rose is a native of the American River watershed in northern California, and for 30 years has lived in the Anacostia River watershed in Columbia Heights, Washington, D.C.

Denise M. Nadeau is a theologian, somatic psychotherapist, spiritual companion, and educator of mixed European heritage. She grew up in Quebec and still spends time in Gespe’gawa’gi and Montreal, where she is an Affiliate Assistant Professor in Religion at Concordia University. She resides in the traditional homelands of the K’omoks Nation on Vancouver Island, where she teaches and writes about Indigenous-Settler relations, decolonization of the body, and the deconstruction of whiteness and colonialism in Christianity.

Ched Myers is an activist theologian who has worked in social change movements for forty years. With a Masters degree in New Testament Studies, he is a popular educator who animates Scripture and issues of faith-based peace and justice. He has published over 100 articles and more than a half-dozen books, most of which can be found at www.ChedMyers.org. He and his partner Elaine Enns, who helped edit this volume, codirect Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries (www.bcm-net.org) in the Ventura River watershed of southern California.

Katerina Friesen lives in Elkhart, Indiana, part of the St. Joseph River watershed, where she recently completed a M.Div. degree in theology and peace studies at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary. Prior to this she worked as a community garden organizer in Oxnard, California and was a member of the Abundant Table farm community. Her interests and writing revolve around